Sociology Commons^™

Parenting Factors, Social Skills, And Value Commitments As Precursors To School Failure, Involvement With Deviant Peers, And Delinquent Behavior, Ronald L. Simons, Les B. Whitbeck, Rand D. Conger, Katherine J. Conger

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Elements of social control theory were combined with social learning theory to construct a model of delinquency which specifies the manner in which parenting factors, social skills, value commitments, and problems in school contribute to association with deviant peers and involvement in delinquent behavior. The model was tested using a sample of 61 families, each of which included a seventh grader. Questionnaire responses and coded videotaped family interaction were employed as measures of study constructs. The results largely supported the proposed model.

Review Of The Gypsy Scholar: A Writer’S Comic Search For A Publisher, By S.S. Hanna., Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This fascinating, humorous, frequently insightful, and well-written book simultaneously illuminates the difficulty and trials of searching for college and university employment and instructs new teachers in strategies for publishing their first non-fiction book. With humility and hurnor, Hanna recounts his personal odyssey as a "gypsy scholar" in marginal teaching positions in small, denominational schools in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Pennsylvania. Hanna's story is a "life-history document" in the best tradition of autobiographical sociology. Beginning teachers and first-time authors will find this book "a good read," and today's part-time instructors and "freeway flyers" will recognize in Hanna a stalwart and sympathetic colleague.

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Harriet Martineau authored the first systematic methodological treatise in sociology, conducted extended international comparative studies of social institutions, and translated Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive into English, thus structurally facilitating the introduction of sociology and positivism into the United States. In her youth she was a professional writer who captured the popular English mind by wrapping social scientific instruction in a series of widely read short novels. In her maturity she was an astute sociological theorist, methodologist, and analyst of the first order. To the extent that any complex institutional phenomenon such as sociology can have identifiable founders, Alice …

Hattie Plum Williams (1878-1963), Michael R. Hill, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The professional life of Hattie Plum Williams unfolded on the geographically isolated Great Plains of eastern Nebraska. She is the first woman known to chair a coeducational, doctoral department of sociology, and as the author of major studies on Russian German immigrants, she made significant disciplinary contributions to sociology. As a woman caught between changing definitions of the division of labor in sociology during the 1920s, she often is characterized as a social worker, although her professional allegiance remained to sociology. Williams epitomized the first generation of professional women sociologists on the Great Plains.

The Pre-Paradigmatic Ideology Of Explained Variance In Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This discussion was originally conceived for presentation in one of the several MSS sections on quantitative methods. My project, however, was the only one for which the organizer of the quantitative sessions could not find a slot. In fact, he neither told me my proposal was rejected nor communicated my name or abstract to the MSS program chair. It. matters to me little whether this was by design or accident -- the result was the same. Were it not for Susan Wright.'s active response to my belated inquiries about the status of my participation in these meetings – and her …

Lucile Eaves (1869-1953), Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Lucile Eaves was a research and applied sociologist, a professor, and an activist. She was fired by a desire to change women's status and that of laborers, anticipating the contemporary concern with the structural ties between class and sex. She worked in the South Park Social Settlement of San Francisco, and as a faculty member at Stanford University, the University of Nebraska, and Simmons College. Her work for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union generated numerous quantitative studies of women's lives in a variety of contexts. She is one of the first sociologists to study medical sociology, especially women with …

Selected Quotations From Harriet Martineau, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Becoming Mature: Childhood Ghosts And Spirits In Adult Life, By Valerie Malhotra Bentz., Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Bentz's work will appeal to many sociologists, including those with interests in contemporary theory, family studies, clinical sociology, and research methodologies. This useful and intellectually stimulating volume appears in the Communications and Social Order series, edited by David Maines. Peter Manning provides the foreword (pp. xiii-xvi).

Bentz builds on an impressive foundation of classical and contemporary theorists, including George Herbert Mead, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Schutz, Jiirgen Haberrnas, and Norman Denzin. Some readers will be outraged by Bentz's conscious joining of symbolic interactionist concepts with ideas from psychoanalytic traditions. But readers who admire Haberrnas' recent transformations of …

The Centennial Ethic And The Spirit Of Archivalism, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

My thinking about the possible relationships between centennials and archives was prompted first by my own work on archives and archival methodology (Hill 1989, 1990, Forthcoming) and second by the upcoming centennial of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. It is to the centennial of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas, however, to which I owe the specific impetus to prepare this paper. I am very pleased, as a neighbor from Nebraska, to celebrate with you the founding of the world's very first department of sociology at the University of Kansas (Sica 1983). We are, of …

Edith Abbott (1876-1957), Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Abbott was the first woman dean of a graduate school in an American university and, simultaneously, the first dean of the first graduate school of social work in the nation. Her leading role in social work overshadowed her deep roots in sociology, in which she was a major scholar of her day. She was a prolific author (Marks 1958) and specialized in the study of women's rights and wages. Her life was dedicated to the eradication of social inequality facing blacks, immigrants, people in poverty, and laborers. Abbott championed the use of statistical data at the University of Chicago during …

Review Of The Role And Nature Of The Doctoral Dissertation, By The Council Of Graduate Schools, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This brief, impressively sponsored report overflows with Machiavellian subtexts, bureaucratic rationalizations, and mendacious platitudes. While concluding that the doctoral dissertation "defines the essence of the PhD degree" (p. 31), the overall message is that doctoral dissertations have become all things to all disciplines and that-further-this diversity of options is legitimate and virtually inexorable. The shock to my academic sensibilities on reading this official policy statement of the Council of Graduate Schools is the realization (once again) that some of our colleagues in several of the engineering, natural, and physical sciences have thoroughly subverted the doctoral process, turning it into a …

Review Of David And Judith Willer, Systematic Empiricism: Critique Of A Pseudoscience (Englewood Cliffs, Nj, 1973), Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Mainstream sociology, tvpically qrounded in data generated by survey questionnaire techniques in tandem with systematic statistical analysis of correlations between ad hot, arbitrarily selected (or, at best, very loosely rationalized) variables (i.e, empirical categories) is the very opposite of genuine (i.e., logically rationalized and philosophically defensible) scientific research. In essence, the Willers argue from a formalist platform standard sociological methods and statistics courses are scientifically worthless and that the novice sociologist who hungers after the “latest statistical techniques” and/or longs for a "good data set to analyze" is fundamentally an idiot who will nonetheless be showered with grant money and …

Alice S. Rossi (1922 – )., Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Alice S. Rossi is a Renaissance scholar. She is a leader in several specialties within sociology and between sociology and other disciplines. Her studies of women, occupations, the family, the life course, sociobiography, and socialization bring together work and ideas from sociology, biology, history, psychology, and anthropology. Her far-ranging academic interests are matched by her influence in the wider society and within professional circles.

Doctoral Dissertations As Liminal Journeys Of The Self: Betwixt And Between In Graduate Sociology Programs, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The sociology dissertation process is a liminal journey, a passage characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and crisis in which the student self is abandoned and a new professional self claims a world of power. authority, maturity, and responsibility. The theoretical perspectives of Victor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, and George H. Mead are extended to conceptualize the “liminal self who undertakes this difficult and problematic journey of transformation. Experiential methodology, in which theory and autobiography are combined, is employed to explicate the dissertation as a conflictful rite de passage and to critique doctoral projects that unrefexively adopt “technical formulas” for success and …

Dimensions Of Ethnic Assimilation: An Empirical Appraisal Of Gordon's Typology, J. Allen Williams Jr., Suzanne T. Ortega

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Researchers often begin by acknowledging that ethnic assimilation is multidimensional, but rarely examine more than one type of assimilation. As a result, studies have used quite disparate indicators of assimilation and have yielded contradictory results. The authors of this study empirically test Milton Gordon’s classic statement on the seven types of assimilation. Results of factor analysis indicate that Gordon’s seven dimensions can be reduced to three- structural, cultural, and receptional.

Media Stereotyping: A Comparison Of The Way Elderly Women And Men Are Portrayed On Prime-Time Television, Joetta A. Vernon, J. Allen Williams Jr., Terri Phillips, Janet Wilson

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This content analysis of 139 programs and 2,211 characters updates and extends previous research on the way elderly people, and especially elderly women, are presented on prime-time television. Findings indicate that females and the elderly continue to be significantly underrepresented. Comparisons of elderly men and women showed patterns of traditional stereotypes, with men more likely to be depicted positively on 7 of 9 desirable traits and women more likely to be depicted negatively on 6 of the 7 undesirable traits which showed a gender difference. However, the proportional differences for specific characteristics typically were neither large nor statistically significant, suggesting …

Bureaucracy, Institutional Change, And Deegan’S Theory Of Core Codes And Liberating Rituals, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In American Ritual Dramas: Social Rules and Cultural Meanings (Greenwood Press, 1989), Mary Jo Deegan presents a theory of core codes and communitas that implicitly challenges the present organization of sociological practice in bureaucratic structures such as universities. The rituals of modern academic sociology are permeated by the same core codes that Deegan finds in many modern participatory and media-constructed rituals, specifically: the codes of oppression (class and sex codes) and the codes of repression (bureaucracy and time codes). Sociology remains little more than a rationalization for repressive and oppressive social control mechanisms unless it convincingly demonstrates and acts upon …

Excavating Underappreciated Sociologists: A Survey Of Assumptions And Strategies In Archival Research, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Archivally-based research in the history and sociology of sociology (especially the recent work of Mary Jo Deegan on Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918) powerfully demonstrates the central epistemological importance of excavating and rehabilitating the contributions of sociologists who have long been ignored by historians of sociology. Archival experience reveals that uncovering the unknown, the unwritten, or the unrecognized in the history of sociology frequently requires reversing the conventional wisdoms of sociological research. Ten archival research strategies are identified. These approaches are best adapted to long-term rather than short-term research programs. It is concluded that. the …

Spindrift Gazes, Ronald Charles Kurtenbach

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Spindrift Gazes is a collection of short stories that thematically relate to how human dignity is engendered and how that sense of dignity is challenged, undercut, and regained. These fictional constructions are particularly concerned with issues of transformation, how and why change takes place. Of particular emphasis is how differing kinds of human relationships are instrumental in the nature of those changes. Of fundamental concern is to give fictional form to human rights issues.

Advisor: Judith Slater

A Theory Of The Sociology Of Women, Helen A. Moore, Jane C. Ollenburger

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Feminist theories present a number of options for organizing a model of inequality for women. At times, these present mutually exclusive concepts or definitions, or even causal factors. Patriarchal theories will not be used because they do not perceive women's oppression. Without an assumption of sex stratification and oppression, women's reality cannot be accurately described. Along with these patriarchal models, sex role socialization theories have been criticized for having (1) an emphasis on finding a singular universal truth and verification method, (2) a commitment to objectivity and observer neutrality, (3) dichotomous classification and primarily causal models, (4) ahistorical views, and …

Teachers' Expectations About The Timing Of Developmental Skills: A Cross-Cultural Study, Carolyn P. Edwards, Lella Gandini

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Today, in the United States, teachers often need to understand what behaviors are normal in terms of children's cultural background. To understand children, teachers of course must have authentic respect for cultural diversity. But they also need something more: depth of knowledge about child development so they know what to expect of children of a given age. Teachers hold internal guidelines regarding many behaviors, but to what degree are they objective standards that can be applied to all children? How much, instead, do they reflect unconscious cultural biases? In recent years, we have begun to find out more about people’s …

Roscoe Pound And American Sociology: A Study In Archival Frame Analysis, Sociobiography And Sociological Jurisprudence, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Roscoe Pound (1870-1964) was a noted botanist, jurist, and sociologist who founded the American school of sociological jurisprudence. Pound's sociological ideas originated at the University of Nebraska. Pound developed numerous ties to other sociologists, joined the American Sociological Society, and published in the American Journal of Sociology. Pound's modern erasure from sociological chronicles is attributed in part to hegemonic processes. The collection of archival data for this study in the history of sociology is generalized (by extending Erving Goffman's metatheory of meaning) as "archival frame analysis." Pound's intellectual milieu is analyzed using Mary Jo Deegan's theory of "core codes" …

Labor Force Participation Of Rural Farm, Rural Nonfarm, And Urban Women: A Panel Update, Jane C. Ollenburger, Sheryl J. Grana, Helen A. Moore

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In this paper, we analyze the paid labor force participation rates and continuity patterns of rural farm, rural nonfarm, and urban women. Specifically, we trace the labor force participation of a panel of approximately 800 women in Nebraska from 1977 to 1985. This paper has a twofold purpose. First, we examine changes in the work status of the cohort of Nebraska women during the farm crisis years. Second, we identify individual factors influencing labor force participation and continuity, contrasting all three residential groups of women.

A loglinear model isolates differences in participation rates for rural and urban women as well …

Empiricism And Reason In Harriet Martineau’S Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The architecture and evolution of Harriet Martineau's sociological epistemology epitomize an essential tension between abstract theory and concrete empiricism. The body of Martineau's intellectual work demonstrates a major conceptual shift, from early religious convictions to subsequent rejection of all metaphysical systems. How to Observe Morals and Manners lies midway in this journey. The epistemological and biographical route to Martineau's adamant repudiation of metaphysics was long, personally tumultuous, and grounded fundamentally in empirical studies of social conditions. I focus here on the give-and-take between metaphysics, empiricism, and rationality in Harriet Martineau's sociological work. Part one of this essay highlights the major …

Dramaturgy In Archival Research: A Frame Analysis Of Disciplinary Reconstruction In Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Research in the history of sociology has with few exceptions depended primarily on interviews, reminiscences, and information gleaned from published sources rather than upon archival data such as unpublished correspondence, manuscripts, diaries, and memos. Recently, however, Mary Jo Deegan (1988) and others have demonstrated the power of archival data for rehabilitating the history of American sociology. Archival research is not without its own set of pitfalls and problems, but archival data can at times provide needed corrections to the skewed and often self-serving historical images portrayed in many of the "standard" published accounts of our disciplinary history.

The Presentation Of The City On ‘Fat-Letter’ Postcards, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Media-constructed rituals are cultural products. Unlike participatory rituals, my focus thus far, media-constructed rituals have more stability, higher internal order and consistency, and greater potential to reach people over time. Cultural artifacts from the past can reach people in their own era, the present, and the future, and in this way they provide a source of continuity even for rapidly changing societies. We begin this section of the book by examining a small artifact in an interaction ritual, the presentation of the city on a particular style of postcard.

Cities are complex human environments that are frequently symbolized in the …

Roscoe Pound’S Sociological Library: The Foundations Of American Sociological Jurisprudence, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Roscoe Pound was an interdisciplinarian of the first order. His active reformation of legal thought and administrative practice in the United States was grounded in careful study of European and American legal and social theorists. He read widely in the discipline of sociology, as the following bibliography of his personal sociological book collection attests. Pound's study of sociology reached more widely and deeply than cursory examination of his published work reveals.

This bibliographic essay introduces modern scholars to the theoretical and intellectual contributions of the discipline of sociology to the foundations of twentieth-century juristic thought in the United States as …

American Charities As The Herald To A New Age, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The publication of American Charities in 1894 signaled the start of a new age. It crystallized the views of men and women working in economics, sociology, history, and philanthropy. Massive social changes-in urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the roles of women, and the relation between the home and the marketplace-generated social strains that could not be accommodated by traditional world views. Social problems in this new situation, particularly poverty, were perceived increasingly as secular instead of religious issues. Solutions to these social problems were needed urgently, and Amos G. Warner, the author of American Charities, articulated a new vision amidst the …

Mari Sandoz’ Sociological Imagination: Capital City As An Ideal Type, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This paper examines Mari Sandoz' (1939) novel Capital City from the perspective of sociology. ‘I outline Sandoz' data collection methods and consider her use of ideal-type analysis and sociological imagination. From the perspective of literary critics it may be, as Helen Stauffer (1982: 131) judged, that Capital City "is not a successful novel." It is not my purpose, however, to contest the merit of Sandoz' work on literary grounds. Rather, I invoke the viewpoint of the sociologist and note the criteria on which I conclude that Capital City is a complex and well-executed sociological study.

What It Means To Be A Humanist Sociologist: A Socioautobiographical Perspective, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

I am delighted to speak to you as a representative of the Association for Humanist Sociology. It is my purpose today to acquaint you with the Association for Humanist Sociology, to prompt your queries about the Association, and to answer your questions concerning the ways in which our organization supports the humanist values and professional interests of students and practicing sociologists across the country. Prior to talking about the “nuts and bolts” of the Association’s history and member services, however, I turn to my central topic for today: a socioautobiographical perspective on what it means to be a humanist sociologist.